Australians Resist Facing Up to Legacy of Parting Aborigines From Families

Emily Liddle remembers scrubbing and polishing floors until she could see her face on the dull linoleum squares. Herbie Laughton talks about his nightmares in the spidery cellar where he was left for three days after ''pinching a wee bit of jam.'' Lana Abbott breaks down trying to describe the mother she never saw again after she was snatched away from home at age 4.

These three Alice Springs residents are part of what Australians now call the ''stolen generation,'' as many as 100,000 Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families between 1910 and the early 1970's.

At the time the program was considered to be in the children's best interest, but it had another acknowledged purpose: to wipe out a people.

The children selected were mixed Aborigines, usually with white fathers or grandfathers, who were to become part of the white society. The architects of the plan believed that full-blooded Aborigines, after another 50 to 75 more years in their remote desert settlements, would die out, from disease and low birth rate.

They had reason to expect this. Numbers of Aborigines had already fallen sharply. For example, in Western Australia in the 1930's the population was estimated at 20,000, down from 60,000 in the 1870's.

Now, after an inquiry, the Government's Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission has set off a political firestorm by calling the old policy ''genocidal'' and urging reparations and establishment of an annual national day of apology.

''Subsequent generations continue to suffer the effects of parents' and grandparents' having been forcibly removed, institutionalized, denied contact with their Aboriginality and in some cases traumatized and abused,'' said the rights panel in a 689-page report. ''Systematic racial discrimination and genocide must not be trivialized, and Australia's obligation under international law to make reparations must not be ignored.''

Australia adopted the United Nations Convention Against Genocide in 1949. The panel found that under the convention Australia was responsible for rehabilitating victims and compensating not only individuals but also families and communities.

Prime Minister John Howard, who heads a 15-month-old conservative-leaning coalition, rejected what he called the ''black armband'' view of history, which he said focused exclusively on atonement for past sins and ignored the future.

''Clearly there were injustices done'' he said, ''and no one should obscure or minimize them.'' But he added, ''Australians of this generation should not be required to accept guilt and blame for past actions and policies over which they had no control.''

A number of newspaper editorials agreed. ''Guilt will do little for reconciliation,'' The Northern Territory News told its readers. The editorial complained about ''rhetoric and window dressing,'' saying they would ''never provide jobs and improve Aborigines' living conditions.''

The Australian, a national daily, and other journals said that although the actions might have been paternalistic and cruel, people carrying out the so-called Native Welfare Acts were motivated by good will.

''No doubt they were,'' said Sir Ronald Wilson, the commission's president. ''But this isn't relevant to the genocide finding. Genocide is not the attempt to destroy an individual. Genocide is the attempt to destroy a people, a culture.''

Long before the white colonization of Australia began in 1788, the indigenous peoples known as Aborigines had established their own cultures in what were largely nomadic societies. Aborigines go back at least 60,000 years. Anthropologists have documents more than 400 languages, After the repression of the last 200 years, few are spoken today.

Mr. Howard has ruled out Government compensation and blocked an official parliamentary apology, which he feels could impede the Government in fighting compensation claims in the courts.

In contrast, Kim C. Beazley, leader of the opposition Labor Party, is pressing for both compensation and a national apology. He calls the removals ''a matter of immense national shame.''

With Aborigines numbering between 400,000 and 500,000, or only 2 to 3 percent of Australia's 18 million people, the Prime Minister's attitude has done little harm to his standing.

One survey by the Newspoll organization has just pegged his approval rating at 42 percent, up five percentage points in the final two weeks of May, while Mr. Beazley's rating dropped six points, to 38 percent.

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The same poll found the country divided on the issue of apology. Fifty percent said one was warranted. Forty percent said none was justified and 10 percent were undecided.

Many of those in favor note the positive response to President Clinton's apology to black Americans who a half century ago were used as guinea pigs in the Tuskegee experiments to test the long-term effects of syphilis. Many of them were deliberately left untreated.

Apology or no, requests for compensation have flooded the courts. Lawyers for the Aborigines argue that the Native Welfare Acts violated the right of Aborigines to equality under the laws by singling them out for discriminatory treatment.

One hurdle, said David Dalrymple, a lawyer for Aborigines in Darwin, is the statute of limitations, which in most of the states and territories is six years. Yet courts have discretion to extend the time, and certain actions are beyond the scope of the statute anyway.

Some of the lighter-skinned Aboriginal children were adopted by white families. Those with darker skins usually ended up in orphanages. Since full-blooded Aborigines with the darkest skin were exempted, mothers were reported to have rubbed their babies with charcoal to try to keep them.

Many of the children around Alice Springs were assigned to a place nicknamed the Bungalow, a few miles out of town. It is near a site that the Nbantu Aboriginal people consider sacred.

The children lived in a crude corrugated metal barracks, later torn down, girls and boys at opposite ends, sleeping on blankets on the concrete floor.

An adjacent house became home for the superintendent and matron. Ms. Liddle, now 77, well remembers the house because that is where she did her scrubbing.

''We never did anything like schoolwork,'' she said. ''They taught us how to do housework more than anything. I polished the floors and did a lot of washing and ironing, and was always hungry.''

The menu, as she recalled, was porridge for breakfast, stew with peas in it for lunch, and two slices of bread with treacle for dinner.

Mr. Laughton, 70, who was so hungry he once stole some jam, was caught and punished for it. He showed a reporter the site of the cellar that he was tossed into for three days after a flogging. It has been filled in.

''When I was locked up in there,'' he said, ''I was thinking the police might come and shoot all the kids there and I might be forgotten and left to die because they told us the police were shooting a lot of Aboriginal people.''

Mr. Laughton said he was a few months old when taken from home.

''When I was 2 years old,'' he said, ''I remember these children the police brought in were crying. They weren't any bigger than me. When I was around 7 years old I heard these big girls saying they were bringing some more babies for us to look after. They were taking them away from their mothers.''

Mrs. Abbott, 49, was 4 when they came for her, two sisters and a brother. She was placed in an orphanage hundreds of miles away in Brisbane. Luckier than most, she got an education, became the first Aboriginal bank teller in Queensland and went on to found an Aboriginal alcoholism clinic in Alice Springs.

''The hardest thing was never again seeing my mother,'' said Mrs. Abbott. ''I have a daughter now, and we have a lovely relationship. We try to do for our daughters what was not done for us.''

Christine Palmer works at the Aboriginal Child Care Agency, which uses hospital, church and other records as well as word of mouth to try to reunite ''stolen generation'' members with their families.

Of the 25,000 people who live in Alice Springs, 4,000 are Aborigines.

''You can't walk the streets here without bumping into someone who has been affected,'' Mrs. Palmer said. ''The hurt is everywhere.''

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A version of this article appears in print on June 8, 1997, on Page 1001018 of the National edition with the headline: Australians Resist Facing Up to Legacy of Parting Aborigines From Families. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe